The morality of proverbs is a subject which I have not been able to leave wholly untouched until now, for of necessity it has offered itself to us continually, in one shape or another; yet hitherto I have not regularly dealt with or considered it. To it I propose to devote the present lecture. But how, it may be asked at the outset, can any general verdict be pronounced about them? In a family like theirs, spread so widely over the face of the earth, must there not be found worthy members and unworthy, proverbs noble and base, holy and profane, heavenly and earthly;—yea, heavenly, earthly, and devilish? What common judgment of praise or censure can be pronounced upon all of these? Evidently none. The only question, therefore, for our consideration must be, whether there exists any such large and unquestionable preponderance either of the better sort or of the worse, as shall give us a right to pronounce a judgment on the whole in their favour or against them, to affirm of them that their preponderating influence and weight is thrown into the balance of the good or of the evil.
And here I am persuaded that no one can have devoted any serious attention to this aspect of the subject, but will own, (and seeing how greatly popular morals are affected by popular proverbs, will own with thankfulness,) that, if not without serious exceptions, yet still in the main they range themselves under the banners of the right and of the truth; he will allow that of so many as move in an ethical sphere at all, very far more are children of light and the day than of darkness and night. Indeed, the comparative paucity of unworthy proverbs is a very noticeable fact, and one to the causes of which I shall have presently to recur.
Coarse proverbs.
At the same time, when I affirm this, I find it necessary to make certain explanations, to draw certain distinctions. In the first place, I would not, by what I have said, in the least deny that an ample number of coarse proverbs are extant: it needs but to turn over a page or two of Ray’s Collection of English Proverbs, or of Howell’s, or indeed of any collection in any tongue, which has not been weeded carefully, to convince oneself of the fact;—nor yet would I deny, that of these many may, more or less, live upon the lips of men. Having their birth, for the most part, in a period of a nation’s literature and life, when men are much more plain-spoken, and have far fewer reticences than is afterwards the case, it is nothing strange that some of them, employing words forbidden now, but not forbidden then, should sound coarse and indelicate enough in our ears: while indeed there are others, whose offence and grossness these considerations, while they may mitigate, are quite insufficient to excuse. But at the same time, gross words and images, (I speak not of wanton ones,) bad as they may be, are altogether different from immoral maxims and rules of life. And it is these immoral maxims, unrighteous, selfish, or otherwise unworthy rules, of which I would affirm the number to be, if not absolutely, yet relatively small.
And then further, in estimating the morality of proverbs, this also will claim in justice not to be forgotten. In the same manner as coarse proverbs are not necessarily immoral, so the application which is made of a proverb by us may very often be hardhearted and selfish, while yet the proverb itself is very far from so being. This selfishness and hardness lay not in it of primary intention, but only by our abuse; and in the cases of several, these two things, the proverb itself, and the ordinary employment of it, will demand to be kept carefully apart from one another. For instance: He has made his bed, and now he must lie on it;—As he has brewed, so he must drink;—As he has sown, so must he reap; [144]—if these are employed to justify us in refusing to save others, so far as we may, from the consequences of their own folly, or imprudence, or even guilt, why then one can only say that they are very ill employed; and there are few of us with whom it would not have gone hardly, had all those about us acted in the spirit of these proverbs so misinterpreted; had they refused to mitigate for us, so far as they could, the consequences of our errors. But if the words are taken in their true sense, as homely announcements of that law of divine retaliations in the world, according to which men shall eat of the fruit of their own doings, and be filled with their own ways, who shall gainsay them? What affirm they more than every page of Scripture, every turn of human life, is affirming too, namely, that the everlasting order of God’s universe cannot be violated with impunity, that there is a continual returning upon men of what they have done, and that in their history we may read their judgment?
Charity begins at home.
Charity begins at home, is the most obvious and familiar of these proverbs, selfishly abused. It may be, no doubt it often is, made the plea for a selfish withholding of assistance from all but a few, whom men may include in their “at home,” while sometimes the proverb receives a narrower interpretation still; and self, and self only, is accounted to be “at home.” And yet, in truth, what were that charity worth, which did not begin at home, which did not preserve the divine order and proportion and degree? It is not for nothing that we have been grouped in families, neighbourhoods, and nations; and he who will not recognise the divinely appointed nearnesses to himself of some over others, who thinks to be a cosmopolite without being a patriot, a philanthropist without owning a distinguishing love for them that are peculiarly “his own,” who would thus have a circumference without a centre, deceives his own heart; and affirming all men, to be equally dear to him, is indeed affirming them to be equally indifferent. Home, the family, this is as the hearth at which the affections which are afterwards to go forth and warm in a larger circle, are themselves to be kept lively and warm; and the charity which did not exercise itself in outcomings of kindness and love in the narrower, would be little likely to seek a wider range for itself. Wherever else it may end, and the larger the sphere which it makes for itself the better, it must yet begin at home. [145]
There are, again, proverbs which, from another point of view, might seem of an ignoble cast, and as calculated to lower the tone of morality among those who received them; proposing as they do secondary, and therefore unworthy, motives to actions, which ought to be performed out of the highest. I mean such as this: Honesty is the best policy; wherein honesty is commended, not because it is right, but because it is most prudent and politic, and has the promise of this present world. Now doubtless there are proverbs not a few which, Prudential morality. like this, move in the region of what has been by Coleridge so well called “prudential morality;” and did we accept them as containing the whole circle of motives to honesty or other right conduct, nothing could be worse, or more fitted to lower the moral standard of our lives. He who resolves to be honest because, and only because, it is the best policy, will be little likely long to continue honest at all. But the proverb does not pretend to usurp the place of an ethical rule; it does not presume to cast down the higher law which should determine to honesty and uprightness, that it may put itself in its place; it only declares that honesty, let alone that it is the right thing, is also, even for this present world, the wisest. Nor dare we, let me further add, despise prudential morality, such as is embodied in sayings like this. The motives which it suggests are helps to a weak and tempted virtue, may prove great assistances to it in some passing moment of a violent temptation, however little they can be regarded as able to make men for a continuance even outwardly upright and just.
And once more, proverbs are not to be accounted selfish, which announce selfishness; unless they do it, either avowedly recommending it as a rule and maxim of life, or, if not so, yet with an evident complacency and satisfaction in the announcement which they make, and in this more covert and perhaps still more mischievous way, taking part with the evil which they proclaim. There are a great many proverbs, which a lover of his race would be very thankful if there had been nothing in the world to justify or to provoke; for the convictions they embody, the experiences on which they rest must be regarded as very far from complimentary to human nature: but seeing they express that which is, however we might desire it were not, it would be idle to wish them away, to wish that this evil had not found its utterance. Nay, it is much better that it should so have done; for thus taking form and shape, and being brought directly under notice, it may be better watched against and avoided. Such proverbs, not selfish, but rather detecting selfishness and laying it bare, are the following; this Russian, on the only too slight degree in which we are touched with other men’s troubles: The burden is light on the shoulders of another; with which the French may be compared: One has always enough strength to bear the misfortunes of one’s friends. [146] Such is this Italian: Every one draws the water to his own mill; [147] or as it appears in its eastern shape, which brings up the desert-bivouack before one’s eyes: Every one rakes the embers to his own cake. Such this Latin, on the comparative wastefulness wherewith that which is another’s is too often used: Men cut broad thongs from other men’s leather; [148] with many more of the same character, which it would be only too easy to bring together.
Selfish proverbs.
With all this, I would not of course in the least deny that immoral proverbs, and only too many of them, exist. For if they are, as we have recognised them to be, the genuine transcript of what is stirring in the hearts of men, then, since there is cowardice, untruth, selfishness, unholiness, profaneness there, how should these be wanting here? The world is not so consummate an hypocrite as the entire absence of all immoral proverbs would imply. There will be merely selfish ones, as our own: Every one for himself and God for us all; or as this Dutch: Self’s the man; [149] or more shamelessly cynical still, as the French: Better a grape for me, than two figs for thee; [150] or again, such as proclaim a doubt and disbelief in the existence of any high moral integrity anywhere, as Every man has his price; or assume that poor men can scarcely be honest, as It is hard for an empty sack to stand straight; or take it for granted that every man would cheat every other if he could, as the French: Count after your father; [151] or, if they do not actually “speak good of the covetous,” yet assume it possible that a blessing can wait on that which a wicked covetousness has heaped together, as the Spanish: Blessed is the son, whose father went to the devil; or find cloaks and apologies for sin, as the German: Once is never; [152] or such as would imply that the evil of a sin lay not in its sinfulness, but in the outward disgrace annexed to it, as the Italian: A sin concealed is half forgiven. [153] Or again there will be proverbs dastardly and base, as the Spanish maxim of caution, which advises to Draw the snake from its hole by another man’s hand; to put, that is, another, and it may be for your own profit, to the peril from which you shrink yourself;—or more dastardly still, “scoundrel maxims,” an old English poet has called them; as for instance, that one which is acted on only too often: One must howl with the wolves; [154] in other words, when a general cry is raised against any, it is safest to join it, lest one be supposed to sympathise with its object; to howl with the wolves, if one would not be hunted by them. In the whole circle of proverbs I know no baser, nor more dastardly than this. And yet who will say that he has never traced in himself the cowardly temptation to obey it? Besides these there will be, of which I shall spare you any examples, proverbs wanton and impure, and not merely proverbs thus earthly and sensual, but devilish; such as some of those Italian on revenge which I quoted in my third lecture.
Immoral proverbs rare.
But for all this these immoral proverbs, rank weeds among the wholesome corn, are comparatively rare. In the minority with all people, they are immeasurably in the minority with most. The fact is not a little worthy of our note. Surely there lies in it a solemn testimony, that however men may and do in their conduct continually violate the rule of right, yet these violations are ever felt to be such, are inwardly confessed not to be the law of man’s life, but the transgressions of the law; and thus, stricken as with a secret shame, and paying an unconscious homage to the majesty of goodness, they do not presume to raise themselves into maxims, nor, for all the frequency with which they may be repeated, pretend to claim recognition as abiding standards of action.
As the sphere in which the proverb moves is no imaginary world, but that actual and often very homely world which is round us and about us; as it does not float in the clouds, but sets its feet firmly on this common earth of ours from which itself once grew, being occupied with present needs and every-day cares, it is only natural that the proverbs having reference to money should be numerous; and in the main it would be well if the practice of the world rose to the height of its convictions as expressed in these. Frugality is connected with so many virtues—at least, its contrary makes so many impossible—that the numerous proverbial maxims inculcating this, than which none perhaps are more frequent on the lips of men, must be regarded as belonging to the better order; [155] especially when taken with the check of others, which forbid this frugality from degenerating into a sordid and dishonourable parsimony; such, I mean, as our own: The groat is ill saved which shames its master. In how many the conviction speaks out that the hastily-gotten will hardly be the honestly-gotten, that “he who makes haste to be rich shall not be innocent,” as when the Spaniards say: He who will be rich in a year, at the half-year they hang him; [156] in how many others, the confidence that the ill-won will also be the ill-spent, [157] that he who shuts up unlawful gain in his storehouses, is shutting up a fire that will one day destroy them. Very solemn and weighty in this sense is the German proverb: The unrighteous penny corrupts the righteous pound; [158] and the Spanish, too, is striking: That which is another’s always yearns for its lord; [159] it yearns, that is, to be gone and get to its true owner. In how many the conviction is expressed that this mammon, which more than anything else men are tempted to think God does not concern Himself about, is yet given and taken away by Him according to the laws of his righteousness; given sometimes to his enemies and for their greater punishment, that under its fatal influence they may grow worse and worse, for The more the carle riches, he wretches; but oftener withdrawn, because no due acknowledgment of Him was made in its use; as when the German proverb declares: Charity gives itself rich; covetousness hoards itself poor; [160] and the Danish: Give alms, that thy children may not ask them; Alms the salt of riches. and the Rabbis, with a yet deeper significance: Alms are the salt of riches; the true antiseptic, which as such shall prevent them from themselves corrupting, and from corrupting those that have them; which shall hinder them from developing a germ of corruption, such as shall in the end involve in one destruction them and their owners. [161]
At the same time, as it is the very character of proverbs to look at matters all round, there are others to remind us that even this very giving itself shall be with forethought and discretion; with selection of right objects, and in right proportion to each. Teaching this, the Greeks said, Sow with the hand, and not with the whole sack; [162] for as it fares with the seed corn, which if it shall prosper, must be providently dispersed with the hand, not prodigally shaken from the sack’s mouth, so is it with benefits, which shall do good either to those who impart, or to those who receive them. Thus again, there is a Danish which says, So give to-day, that thou shalt be able to give to-morrow; and another: So give to one, that thou shalt have to give to another. [163] And as closing this series, as teaching us in a homely but striking manner, with an image Dantesque in its vigor, that a man shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth, take this Italian, Our last robe, that is our winding sheet, is made without pockets. [164]
Manly proverbs.
Let me further invite you to observe and to admire the prevailing tone of manliness which pervades the great body of the proverbs of all nations: let me urge you to take note how very few there are which would fain persuade you that “luck is all,” or that your fortunes are in any other hands, under God, than your own. This our own proverb, Win purple and wear purple, proclaims. There are some, but they are exceptions, to which the gambler, the idler, the so-called “waiter upon Providence,” can appeal. For the most part, however, they courageously accept the law of labour, No pains, no gains,—No sweat, no sweet,—No mill, no meal, [165] as the appointed law and condition of man’s life. Where wilt thou go, ox, that thou wilt not have to plough? [166] is the Catalan remonstrance addressed to one, who imagines by any outward change of circumstances to evade the inevitable task and toil of existence. And this is Turkish: It is not with saying Honey, Honey, that sweetness will come into the mouth; and to many languages another with its striking image, Sloth, the key of poverty, [167] belongs: while, on the other hand, there are in almost all tongues such proverbs as the following: God helps them that help themselves; [168] or as it appears with a slight variation in the Basque: God is a good worker, but He loves to be helped. And these proverbs, let me observe by the way, were not strange, in their import at least, to the founder of that religion which is usually supposed to inculcate a blind and indolent fatalism—however some who call themselves by his name may have forgotten the lesson which they convey. Certainly they were not strange to Mahomet himself; if the following excellently-spoken word has been rightly ascribed to him. One evening, we are told, after a weary march through the desert, he was camping with his followers, and overheard one of them saying, “I will loose my camel, and commit it to God;” on which Mahomet took him up: “Friend, tie thy camel, and commit it to God;” [169] do, that is, whatever is thine to do, and then leave the issue in higher hands; but till thou hast done this, till thou hast thus helped thyself, thou hast no right to look to Heaven to help thee.
How excellently this unites genuine modesty and manly self-assertion: Sit in your own place, and no man can make you rise; and how good is this Spanish, on the real dignity which there often is in doing things for ourselves, rather than in standing by and suffering others to do them for us: Who has a mouth, let him not say to another, Blow. [170] And as a part of this which I have called the manliness of proverbs, let me especially note the noble utterances which so many contain, summoning to a brave encountering of adverse fortune, to perseverance under disappointment and defeat and a long-continued inclemency of fate; breathing as they do, a noble confidence that for the brave and bold the world will not always be adverse. Where one door shuts another opens; [171] this belongs to too many nations to allow of our ascribing it especially to any one. And this Latin: The sun of all days has not yet gone down, [172] however, in its primary application intended for those who are at the top of Fortune’s wheel, to warn them that they be not high-minded, for there is yet time for many a revolution in that wheel, is equally good for those at the bottom, and as it contains warning for those, so strength and encouragement for these; for, as the Italians say: The world is his who has patience. [173] And then, to pass over some of our own, so familiar that they need not be adduced, how manful a lesson is contained in Persian proverb.this Persian proverb: A stone that is fit for the wall, is not left in the way. It is a saying made for them who appear for a while to be overlooked, neglected, passed by; who perceive in themselves capacities, which as yet no one else has recognised or cared to turn to account. Only be fit for the wall; square, polish, prepare thyself for it; do not limit thyself to the bare acquisition of such knowledge as is absolutely necessary for thy present position; but rather learn languages, acquire useful information, stretch thyself out on this side and on that, cherishing and making much of whatever aptitudes thou findest in thyself; and it is certain thy turn will come. Thou wilt not be left in the way; sooner or later the builders will be glad of thee; the wall will need thee to fill up a place in it, quite as much as thou needest a place to occupy in the wall. For the amount of real capacity in this world is so small, that places want persons to fill them quite as really as persons want to fill places; although it must be allowed, they are not always as much aware of their want.
And this proverb, Italian and Spanish, If I have lost the ring, yet the fingers are still here, [174] is another of these brave utterances of which I have been speaking. In it is asserted the comparative indifference of that loss which reaches but to things external to us, so long us we ourselves remain, and are true to ourselves. The fingers are far more than the ring: if indeed those had gone, then the man would have been maimed; but another ring may come for that which has disappeared, or even with none the fingers will be fingers still. And as at once a contrast and complement to this, take another, current among the free blacks of Hayti, and expressing well the little profit which there will be to a man in pieces of mere good luck, which are no true outgrowths of anything which is in him; the manner in which, having no root in himself out of which they grew, they will, as they came to him by hazard, go from him by the same: The knife which thou hast found in the highway, thou wilt lose in the highway. [175]
Abuse of proverbs.
But these numerous proverbs, urging self-reliance, bidding us first to aid ourselves, if we would have Heaven to aid us, must not be dismissed without a word or two at parting. Prizing them, as we well may, and the lessons which they contain, at the highest, yet it will be profitable for us at the same time always to remember that to such there lies very near such a mischievous perversion as this: “Aid thyself, and thou wilt need no other aid;” even as they have been sometimes, no doubt, understood in this sense. As, then, the pendant and counter-weight to them all, not as unsaying what they have said, but as fulfilling the other hemisphere in the complete orb of truth, let me remind you of such also as the following, often quoted or alluded to by Greek and Latin authors: The net of the sleeping (fisherman) takes; [176]—a proverb the more interesting, that we have in the words of the Psalmist, (Ps. cxxvii. 2,) when accurately translated, a beautiful and perfect parallel: “He giveth his beloved” (not “sleep,” as in our version, but) “in sleep;” God’s gifts gliding into his bosom, he knowing not how, and as little expecting as having laboured for them. Of how many of the best gifts of every man’s life will he not thankfully acknowledge this to have been true; or, if he refuse to allow it, and will acknowledge no eudÆmonia, no ‘favourable providence’ in his prosperities, but will see them all as of work, how little he deserves, how little likely he is, to retain them to the end. Let us hold fast, then, this proverb as the most needful complement of those.
I feel that I should be wanting to hearers such as those who are assembled here, that I should fail in that purpose which has been, more or less, present to me even in dealing with the lighter portions of my subject, if I did not earnestly remind you of the many of these sayings that there are, which, while they have their lesson for all, yet seem more directly addressed to those standing, as not a few of us here, at the threshold of the more serious and earnest portion of their lives. Proverbs for young men. Lecturing to a Young Men’s Society, I shall not unfitly press these upon your notice. Take this Italian one, for instance: When you grind your corn, give not the flour to the devil, and the bran to God;—in the distribution, that is, of your lives, apportion not your best years, your strength and your vigour to the service of sin and of the world, and only the refuse and rejected to your Maker, the wine to others, and the lees only to Him. Not so; for there is another ancient proverb, [177] which we have made very well our own, and which in English runs thus: It is too late to spare, when all is spent. The words have obviously a primary application to the goods of this present life; it is ill saving here, when nothing or next to nothing is left to save. But they are applied well by a heathen moralist, (and the application lies very near,) to those who begin to husband precious time, and to live for life’s true ends, when life is nearly gone, is now at its dregs; for, as he well urges, it is not the least only which remains at the bottom, but the worst. [178] On the other hand, The morning hour has gold in its mouth; [179] and this, true in respect of each of our days, in which the earlier hours given to toil will yield larger and more genial returns than the later, is true in a yet higher sense, of that great life-day, whereof all the lesser days of our life make up the moments, is true in respect of moral no less than mental acquisition. The evening hours have often only silver in their mouths at the best. Nor is this Arabic proverb, as it appears to me, other than a very solemn one, being far deeper than at first sight it might seem: Every day in thy life is a leaf in thy history; a leaf which shall once be turned back to again, that it may be seen what was written there; and that whatever was written may be read out in the hearing of all.
And among the proverbs having to do with a prudent ordering of our lives from the very first, this Spanish seems well worthy to be adduced: That which the fool does in the end, the wise man does at the beginning; [180] the wise with a good grace what the fool with an ill; the one to much profit what the other to little or to none. A word worth laying to heart; for, indeed, that purchase of the Sibylline books by the Roman king, what a significant symbol it is of that which at one time or another, or, it may be, at many times, is finding place in almost every man’s life;—the same thing to be done in the end, the same price to be paid at the last, with only the difference, that much of the advantage, as well as all the grace, of an earlier compliance has past away. The nine precious volumes have shrunk to six, and these dwindled to three, while yet the like price is demanded for the few as for the many; for the remnant now as would once have made all our own.
I have already in a former lecture adduced a proverb which warns against a bad book as the worst of all robbers. In respect too of books which are not bad, nay, of which the main staple is good, but in which there is yet an admixture of evil, as is the case with so many that have come down to us from that old world not as yet partaker of Christ, there is a proverb, which may very profitably accompany us in our study of all these: Where the bee sucks honey, the spider sucks poison. Study of the Classics. Very profitably may this word be kept in mind by such as at any time are making themselves familiar with the classical literature of antiquity, the great writers of heathen Greece and Rome. How much of noble, how much of elevating do they contain: what love of country, what zeal for wisdom, may be quickened in us by the study of them; yea, even to us Christians what intellectual, what large moral gains will they yield. Let the student be as the bee looking for honey, and from the fields and gardens of classical literature he may store it abundantly in his hive. And yet from this same body of literature what poison is it possible to draw; what loss, through familiarity with evil, of all vigorous abhorrence of it, till even the foulest enormities shall come to be regarded with a speculative curiosity rather than with an earnest hatred,—yea, what lasting defilements of the imagination and the heart may be contracted hence, till nothing shall be pure, the very mind and conscience being defiled. Let there come one whose sympathies and affinities are with the poison and not with the honey, and in these fields it will not be impossible for him to find deadly flowers and weeds from which he may suck poison enough.
With a few remarks on two proverbs more I will bring this lecture to an end. Here is one with an insight at once subtle and profound into the heart of man: Ill doers are ill deemers; and instead of any commentary on this of my own let me quote some words which were not intended to be a commentary upon it at all, and which furnish notwithstanding a better than any which I could hope to give. They are words of a great English divine of the 17th century, who is accounting for the offence which the Pharisee took at the Lord’s acceptance of the affectionate homage and costly offering of the woman that was a sinner: “Which familiar and affectionate officiousness, and sumptuous cost, together with that sinister fame that woman was noted with, could not but give much scandal to the Pharisees there present. For that dispensation of the law under which they lived making nothing perfect, but only curbing the outward actions of men; it might very well be that they, being conscious to themselves of no better motions within than of either bitterness or lust, how fair soever they carried without, could not deem Christ’s acceptance of so familiar and affectionate a service from a woman of that fame to proceed from anything better than some loose and vain principle ... for by how much every one is himself obnoxious to temptation, by so much more suspicious he is that others transgress, when there is anything that may tempt out the corruptions of a man.” [181]
Chinese proverb.
And in this Chinese proverb which follows, Better a diamond with a flaw, than a pebble without one, there is, to my mind, the assertion of a great Christian truth, and of one which reaches deep down to the very foundations of Christian morality, the more valuable as coming to us from a people beyond the range and reach of the influences of direct Revelation. We may not be all aware of the many and malignant assaults which were made on the Christian faith, and on the morality of the Bible, through the character of David, by the blind and self-righteous Deists of a century or more ago. Taking the Scripture testimony about him, that he was the man after God’s heart, and putting beside this the record of those great sins which he committed, they sought to set these great, yet still isolated, offences in the most hateful light; and thus to bring at once him, and the Book which praised him, to a common shame. But all this while, the question of the man, what he was, and what the moral sum total of his life, to which alone the Scripture testimony bore witness, and to which alone it was pledged, this was a question with which they concerned themselves not at all; while yet it was a far more important question than what any of his single acts may have been; and it was this which, in the estimate of his character, was really at issue. To this question we answer, a diamond, which, if a diamond with a flaw, as are all but the one “entire and perfect chrysolite,” would yet outvalue a mountain of pebbles without one, such as they were; even assuming the pebbles to be without; and not merely to seem so, because their flaw was an all-pervading one, and only not so quickly detected, inasmuch as the contrast was wanting of any clearer material which should at once reveal its presence.
